New York Magazine reports:

The new “2020 Census of American Religion” from the Public Religion Research Institute is out, and while it has a number of interesting findings, the most surprising is that among white Christians, mainline Protestants have reversed a long-standing decline in membership and have now surged past Evangelical Protestants.

The survey measured self-identification among white Christians as “evangelical”/“born-again” Protestant or “other” Protestant, so it is not correlated to institutional membership in this or that denomination. But generally speaking, “mainline” Protestants are the relatively liberal denominations that belong to the World Council of Churches, including United Methodists, Episcopalians, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and other old-school, WASP-y “brands.” Meanwhile “Evangelical” Protestants include Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ, conservative Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Anglican split-off sects, and various Pentecostal and nondenominational but conservative groups.

According to PRRI, mainline Protestants now account for 27 percent of white Christians, while Evangelicals make up 23 percent. While white Christians as a whole have been steadily declining as a portion of the population for decades, the most recent number shows a reversal of trends between mainliners, who are experiencing an uptick in affiliation (from 13 percent of Americans in 2016 to 16 percent now), and Evangelicals, who continue to decline (they were 23 percent of the population as recently as 2006, but now stand at 14 percent). [Continue reading…]